Professor Wolff sits down on with Tavis Smiley on the Tavis Smiley Show on Los Angeles based KBLA 1580 AM. Professor Wolff and Tavis discuss what it means for Elon Musk’s wealth to have reached the trillion dollar mark.

Please Note: The conversation starts at about 1:05:00 mark.

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Professor Wolff’s latest book “Understanding Capitalism” is available now for purchase: Here

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On Jamarl Thomas’ podcast, Richard Wolff discusses the current economic state of affairs.

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Iran is outmaneuvering the United States and Trump is furious. Professor Richard Wolff and Brian Becker discuss the current war in Iran and the future of the globe – as Russia, China, Iran, and other countries start to pry control from the United States.

Professor Richard Wolff is an author & co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work. You can find his work at rdwolff.com.

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Professor Wolff’s latest book “Understanding Capitalism” is available now for purchase: Here

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Richard Wolff joins Dr. Wilmer Leon on his podcast “Inside the Issues” to talk about his latest piece “Europe and the United States: Crossroads Then and Now”. Asking the question: Will the Capitalist class drive the world into a third global conflict that will end in economic ruin?

Read Professor Wolff’s article Here::

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A new Wall Street Journal study finds that the five biggest home insurers, Allstate, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, United Services Automobile Association, and Farmers Insurance, denied nearly half of all claims last year. The primary driver is an increase in deductibles, which insurers claim is being done to compensate for an increase in weather-related catastrophes. Professor Richard Wolff and producer Nicole Roussell discuss.

Professor Richard Wolff is an author & co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work. You can find his work at rdwolff.com.

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Professor Wolff’s latest book “Understanding Capitalism” is available now for purchase: Here

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There is a “too soon” topic that has recently been budding in mainstream media… particularly in cinema. I’m sure you can already suspect what it is that I’m going to say. Well, let’s get into it.

Gun violence is nothing new in itself as a cinematic tool. Nor is gun violence with respect to school shootings or domestic abuse. But for a time, with the exception of documentary and news coverage, it seemed to be one of those “off limits” topics that had no place in experimental artistry or entertainment. This is no longer the case.

Our Hero, Balthazar released in the US about a month ago to 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and rave audience reviews. It signaled Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut, who has otherwise been a producer on various films like Uncut Gems and Frances Ha, and featured a star-studded cast of Jaeden Martell (who co-produced and played the titular character), Asa Butterfield, Pippa Knowles, Noah Centino, and other unexpected appearances. The film is an extremely dark comedy that follows Martell’s “Balthy” on an impulsive journey to try and prevent a potential Texan school shooter that he has connected with on Instagram.

And he does it entirely for a girl’s attention.

Now, this is one of those surprising-unsurprising tropes that has become a bit more popularized in recent media of “this is the dynamic we’re going to establish for you and slightly destabilize it towards the end right before everything blows up.” It’s not outright an “unexpected villain” story, due to the nature that seemingly none of the characters turn out to be “good” or redeemed by their intentions.

From the very beginning of the film, Balthazar is revealed to be a Patrick Bateman-style psychopathic “activist” who cries about social injustice on Instagram. He heavily researches emotional clickbait and manipulative taglines to draw in viewers and posit himself as a voice of activism, only to turn off the waterworks the millisecond the cameras stop rolling. Through multiple “takes” of the same scene, the audience is shown this morbid habit in a sort of comical, satirical portrayal of Gen Z’s delusional social media activism mindset.

His foil, Solomon (played by Asa Butterfield) is initially portrayed as ne’er do well trailer-trash, who has been dealt multiple bad hands throughout his life, and in turn has turned reactionary. He captures Balthy’s attention by threatening to go through with his plan to do a shooting.

It’s very clean cut in the social and power dynamics between this unlikely pairing that for the majority of the film, there is indeed a string of shocking hilarities that come out of Balthy and Solomon’s “friendship.” Brains versus guns. Emotions versus apathy. It’s a match made in perfected perversion.

What is ultimately disarming are some of the lengths that Balthy goes to in order to win over an initially suspicious Solomon… an intricately developed AI catfish, accusations of rape, and a macabre fascination with the deed he’s trying to “prevent.” The hero mindset is inherently a masquerade from the start, but as he spends more time with Solomon, it becomes chillingly apparent that when it comes down to the heat of the moment itself, the priorities of each of the boys are completely inverted.

This is only the latest portrait of this topic. Just this spring, The Drama took to social media and ignited heavy discourse about its character dynamics. Whether or not the film ended up pulling off what it was trying to (I personally think it missed all the marks), it was a cornerstone of debate for weeks. And before that, Ari Aster’s Eddington approached very similar ideologies of the violent apathy of social media activism and realtime violence during the pandemic.

These and other examples assess systemic manipulation and the widespread social resentment. It’s become normalized to hold onto extreme disgust rather than offer neighbors grace and understanding.

Such as it is, Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Joe Cross, abuses his power as sheriff and takes to a renegade crusade to restore “order and structure” to his small town. Alana Haim’s Rachel positions herself as the antagonist from the very beginning, taking Emma’s guilty and harrowing secret and blowing it entirely out of proportion, if to use as leverage against a woman she clearly wants to destroy. And Martell’s Balthy decides it’s his “responsibility” to stop a potential tragedy (and perhaps livestream it for his followers).

In each case, these characters all purport the “white savior” complex, acting without regard to repercussions or care for genuine consequence. Their sense of individualism is so extreme it becomes self-righteousness, and in turn runs rampant through the people around them.

Because no one does anything to check them.

And because no one checks them, the spectacle they create becomes even more ludicrous. The mindlessness of the Eddington teenagers that Cross enables results in a violent martyrdom about how they “have no right to speak on behalf” of the indigenous and black communities present. And yet, there they are, taking up the visibility.

Balthazar also takes to his digital soapbox, stealing the words of other (real) victims online and turning them into personal mantras.

Rachel is pettier, and somehow more aggressive about her approach. She just can’t seem to look past her own opinions long enough to table the issues and hash them out in an appropriate setting. So she makes everyone around her into miserable, nervous wrecks.

And that’s one other thing… this inherent “wickedness” of the marginalized characters in these movies. Emma, Solomon, and Mayor Garcia are all set up as the “bad” characters because of the controversial aspects about their personas. Is it because none of them are the clean, educated, rich, white characters that stand opposite them?

I will say that The Drama does a great deal to humanize Zendaya’s troubled protagonist through flashbacks and gentle monologues… It is the same with Asa Butterfield’s character. But even so, you’re still not sure if you’re supposed to root for them when the end comes. They don’t ever get “redeemed” in any meaningful way. Then their fate comes, and you just accept the outcome.

Is that the responsible thing to do? Utilize the angst and turmoil of these “people’s” perspectives, only to do the predictable thing with their “resolution?” I’m not so sure.

If Eddington is a cold, westernized political “horror” and The Drama is a psychological case study/thriller, then Our Hero, Balthazar is a slapstick comedy that tackles the current desensitized Gen Z billionaire POV. But with each example, there is something ultimately lacking from the result. Perhaps it’s that these creators are still too close to their subject matter, even if they believe they aren’t. It could also be this through-line of no real consequences.

The blame on the antagonists is deferred to institutional blame, which automatically reaches up to the more nuanced device of political criticism… it works, sure. But it’s not a full resolution if the stories are about the people themselves.

This is in part because of the “hyper-realism” this niche of media is leaning into. In real life and in real time, there are no repercussions for the financially, racially, or culturally privileged. There is inherent wiggle room for those not deemed as a “usual suspect.”

But the irony of films like these is that they don’t seem capable of fully capturing the story they’re presenting, especially not as blockbusters. Characters like Sheriff Cross, Rachel, and little, sadistic Balthy are left standing at the end because those are the “logical conclusions” of evil triumphing over the underdog. Where in real life these things ring true, there is too much emphasis on the expected reality, and these films start to forget that they’re still films.

It’s a shame that these stories rely so heavily on the narrative that the white billionaire just up and walks away from the carnage they’ve created completely unscathed, if not better off than they were before. It might be the current understanding of what continues to go on in the world, particularly in the “American World,” but the reinforcement of this kind of defeatist-ism isn’t doing anyone any favors. It certainly isn’t providing refreshing vantages or productive and worthwhile discourse.

Bring back hope, people. Even if it’s make believe for the time being.

Marcello Cortese is a New York based writer and editor. His writing is culturally informed and spans across genres, including poetry, fiction, and criticism.

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In this recent conversation Professor Richard D. Wolff speaks with Micheal Hudson and Nima R. Alkhorshid on recent events in Iran and the declining U.S. Empire

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Professor Richard Wolff guest hosting The Deep Focus Show. The Deep Focus Show airs weekly on WBAI and is also available on YouTube providing Raw, intelligent conversations with investigative journalists, whistleblowers, political analysts, and influential voices from around the world.

On this episode of Deep Focus, Richard Wolff speaks with historian and author Paul Street about the growing crisis of American capitalism, the rise of authoritarian politics, and the future of democracy in the United States. From the decline of U.S. global power to the emergence of what Street describes as a new form of American fascism, the conversation explores the economic and political forces driving today’s instability.

Together, they discuss Trumpism beyond Trump, the erosion of democratic norms, capitalism in crisis, and why millions of Americans are losing faith in existing institutions. The episode also examines nationalism, inequality, imperialism, and the broader global consequences of America’s political transformation.

The Deep Focus Show dives into global politics, international conflicts, corruption, media narratives, and the most important issues of our time — bringing perspectives rarely seen in mainstream media.


No scripted talking points. No manufactured outrage. Just real conversations and serious journalism.

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There are a few people from the Occupy Wall Street era I still pay close attention to. Micah Bornfree (formerly Micah White) — is one of them.

That’s because long before Occupy became a meme, a punchline, or a nostalgic memory for aging leftists, it was something genuinely world-shifting. And Micah was instrumental in its inception. As an editor at Adbusters and co-creator of the original Occupy Wall Street call, he helped spark a mass uprising that fundamentally changed political language in the US.

Before Occupy, almost nobody talked about the “1%.” After Occupy, everybody did.

That matters.

From my perspective, Occupy was a critical, necessary but ultimately incomplete experiment. It sparked public imagination and inspired action, but failed to build durable institutions or long-term political power. Millions of people were naming that grotesque inequality was not an unfortunate accident — it was the operating system.

Micah has spent the years since then wrestling honestly with why Occupy exploded so powerfully and yet could not sustain itself. Unlike many activists who simply repeat the old protest rituals harder and louder, Micha has been willing to ask uncomfortable questions. His book The End of Protest argued that traditional mass demonstrations often create spectacle without sufficient strategic leverage. Whether one agrees with him completely or not, he certainly asking the right question: Why do movements with enormous moral energy so often fail to build lasting power?

Now he has launched a new project called Outcry.



I’ll admit upfront: I’m both intrigued and skeptical.

Outcry appears to be an attempt to rethink activism for the age of AI, decentralized communication, encrypted networks, and algorithmic politics. Micha describes it as a kind of activist AI and organizing infrastructure — less a traditional organization and more an experimental coordination layer for future movements.

That sentence alone will probably make some of my readers either excited or deeply nervous. Honestly, both reactions are understandable. Hell, I am feeling both of those emotions writing this essay…lol

On one hand, I agree that Micah is correctly identifying something many movement spaces still struggle to grasp: The terrain has fundamentally changed. We are no longer organizing in the media environment of 1999, or even 2011. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic persuasion, surveillance capitalism, digital swarm behavior, and fragmented information ecosystems are already reshaping politics faster than most organizers can process.

The old protest playbook is clearly exhausted. Millions marched against the Iraq War. Millions marched after George Floyd. Millions marched for climate action. And yet oligarchy, authoritarianism, and ecological collapse continue advancing.

Micha’s willingness to confront that reality deserves respect.

What makes Outcry especially interesting to me is that it is not merely another nonprofit, NGO, or ideological sect trying to recruit followers. It seems to be an attempt to build movement infrastructure for a new era. In that sense, it shares some DNA with earlier ecosystem-building efforts like the World Social Forum, the US Social Forum, Occupy, and several emerging Solidarity Economy networks: Decentralized, experimental, translocal, and searching for new forms of collective intelligence.

And yet I also have concerns.

Movements do not only need disruption. They need durable institutions. They need cooperatives, land trusts, public banks, unions, mutual aid systems, political organizations, local media, and regional economic ecosystems. They need ways for ordinary people to govern, feed, employ, house, and protect one another.

One of Occupy’s great weaknesses was that it excelled at symbolic rupture but struggled to build enduring organizational forms afterward. The question hanging over Outcry is whether it can move beyond amplification and coordination into the slower, harder work of institution-building.

So I find myself cautiously optimistic.

Partly because Micha seems more grounded than what I experienced during the Occupy heyday. There is more humility in his current work, more acknowledgment of failure, contradiction, and historical transition. He increasingly speaks about “constructive failure” — the idea that movements can fail operationally while still changing the political terrain for future struggles.

That strikes me as true.

Maybe Occupy was not the revolution. Maybe it was the opening signal of a much longer transition away from neoliberal capitalism and toward something we do not yet fully understand.

If so, projects like Outcry may represent early experiments in what movement coordination looks like in the AI era. Some of those experiments will fail. Some probably should fail. But refusing to experiment at all would be even more dangerous.

The future will belong to movements capable of combining imagination with infrastructure, disruption with durability, and digital coordination with a rooted human community.

Micah helped ignite one political awakening already. Whether Outcry becomes the beginning of another one remains to be seen.

David Cobb is the host of the popular podcast Redneck Gone Green, dubbed a “people’s lawyer”, David has spent his career litigating corporate polluters and civil rights violators. He was the Green Party Presidential nominee In 2004, In 2010 he co-founded Move To Amend, In 2016 he served as the Campaign Manager for Jill Stein’s presidential campaign. Currently he serves as the Co-Coordinator of the US Solidarity Economy Network and the People’s Network for Land Liberation, a consortium which seeks to de-commodify the land to reestablish a right relationship with the earth and all of our relatives and relations.

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More than 50,000 members of the British Columbia Nurses’ Union (BCNU) voted overwhelmingly in favor of strike action after contract talks with their employer broke down on April 20. An extraordinary 98.2% of members voted “yes,” producing one of the strongest strike mandates in the union’s history.

The result sends a powerful message: nurses across British Columbia are united and prepared to fight for better working conditions and a stronger public health-care system. The vote was the culmination of months of organizing efforts by nurses throughout the province.

Just days before the vote, on April 30, nurses from across British Columbia marched through downtown Vancouver in a major show of solidarity. Representatives from the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, the Nova Scotia Nurses’ Union, the United Nurses of Alberta, the BC General Employees’ Union, the Health Sciences Association, and several other labor organizations joined the rally in support of the BCNU’s demands.

At the center of the dispute are concerns over unsafe staffing levels, workplace violence, and crushing workloads. In negotiations for a new contract, the union is seeking stronger protections aimed at reducing systemic pressures that nurses face every day on the job.

“This vote is a defining moment,” BCNU President Adriane Gear said in a news release. “Nurses across British Columbia are demanding the respect, safety, and fair contract they deserve.”

Gear emphasized that nurses do not want to strike, but said they are prepared to take action if necessary. “Nurses do not want to be in this position,” she stated. “Yet they are prepared to fight for the future of nursing and for a health-care system that is safe, sustainable, and able to retain the nurses that patients rely on.”

One of the union’s major concerns is the growing level of violence directed at health-care workers in the province. According to WorkSafeBC, there were 1,102 accepted claims in 2024 involving acts of violence or force against nurses, nurse aides, orderlies, and patient service associates. That number has risen significantly from 988 such claims recorded in 2020.

The nurses’ efforts have also drawn political attention and support from opposition parties in British Columbia’s Legislative Assembly. Anna Kindy, a member of the Legislative Assembly and health critic for the B.C. Conservative Party, criticized the provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) government for failing to adequately address workplace safety concerns while simultaneously attempting to recruit more nurses.

“We need to address this issue in the context of a health-care crisis,” Kindy said. “Getting assaulted in the hospital or getting punched in the face is not a way of retaining your nurses.”

Emily Lowan, leader of the B.C. Green Party, offered even sharper criticism of the NDP government’s handling of the issue. Lowan argued that the province has failed to move aggressively enough to establish minimum nurse-to-patient ratios that had previously been negotiated with the union.

She also criticized the government’s spending priorities, pointing to more than half a billion dollars spent on private nursing contracts over the past two years.

“If health authorities and government are willing to spend this kind of money on for-profit private nursing services,” Lowan said, “why wouldn’t we want to invest in the nurses that are already here in B.C., actually improve their working conditions with good benefits and staff-to-patient ratios?”

With growing public attention, strong solidarity from organized labor, and support from opposition parties, pressure is mounting on the provincial government to reach an agreement with the nurses. Many across British Columbia are now hoping a fair settlement can be achieved before a strike becomes necessary.

Sources

• CBC News – B.C. nurses vote overwhelmingly in favor of strike action

• BC Nurses’ Union – “Treat Us Some Respect” rally ahead of historic strike vote

• BC Nurses’ Union – Nurses deliver strongest strike mandate in union history

• BC Nurses’ Union on X (Twitter)

• PressProgress – BC Nurses Union could vote to strike over benefits

• Daily Hive – BC nurses strike coverage

• BC Nurses’ Union Facebook post

• CBC News – Nurses rally over workplace violence concerns

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Professor Richard Wolff guest hosting The Deep Focus Show. The Deep Focus Show airs weekly on WBAI and is also available on YouTube providing Raw, intelligent conversations with investigative journalists, whistleblowers, political analysts, and influential voices from around the world.

In this episode of Deep Focus, Professor Richard Wolff sits down with Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, for a wide-ranging discussion on the shifting balance of global power, the Iran conflict, U.S. foreign policy, and the future of multipolar geopolitics.

The conversation explores whether recent developments in the Middle East signal the decline of American military primacy, the rise of new global power structures, and how asymmetric warfare is reshaping international relations. Parsi offers deep insight into Iran’s strategic position, China’s global ambitions, Israel’s evolving political landscape, and the broader implications for the future world order.

The Deep Focus Show dives into global politics, international conflicts, corruption, media narratives, and the most important issues of our time — bringing perspectives rarely seen in mainstream media.


No scripted talking points. No manufactured outrage. Just real conversations and serious journalism.

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Professor Wolff’s latest book “Understanding Capitalism” is available now for purchase: Here

By the end of World War 2 in Europe, that continent’s extremely violent self-destruction had killed tens of millions and wrecked many economies. Its politically dominant employer classes had driven their national governments to a clash that had produced those results. By 1945 the war’s outcome had proved far worse than many in those classes had imagined or wanted before the war. Europeans had struggled after 1917/1918 to overcome their self-destruction in World War 1. In the short span between the end of the First and the beginning of the Second World War, Europe destabilized itself via its reparations program, Germany’s staggering inflation, and then global capitalism’s worst ever collapse in 1929. The consequences of those destabilizations ramified across Europe and undermined the League of Nations effort to prevent a second world war.

In 1945, for most Europeans, the greatest urgency attached to recovery from the war. For Europe’s employing classes, more urgent still were defenses against certain immediate threats. Russia’s army had been crucial to defeating the Nazis and to forging Russia’s post-war alliances with Eastern Europe. The mass of the USSR’s military forces, potentially supplemented by those of its new Eastern European allies, struck western Europe’s employer classes as existential threats. After 1945, western Europe’s employer classes smoothly and quickly refocused their hatred from a dead Hitler to the living Stalin and to their nations’ communist parties allied to Stalin.

Western Europe’s employer classes were threatened domestically by communist and socialist political parties whose militants had often led underground anti-fascist or anti-Nazi resistances. Thereby those militants often became broadly popular leaders. Across Europe national communist parties collaborated in various ways with one another (including the powerful Soviet party). Some post-war European heads of state such as France’s Charles de Gaulle included communist party leaders in their governments. In reaction to such developments, Europe’s employer classes quickly became obsessed with the great twin dangers of “communism at home and abroad.”

A parallel development had happened across the Atlantic in the US. There the Great Depression after 1929 had provoked a mass political shift leftward by the US public. Employees in unprecedented numbers had joined industrial unions allied in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Tens of thousands joined two socialist parties and one communist party. Because the socialists and communists were often the militants in the CIO’s successful organizing drives across major industries, employers in the US were all the more alarmed by those successes in the 1930s and the 1940s. The CIO, socialist and communist parties also formed a far more powerful coalition within the Democratic Party than they had ever been before 1929.

The alliance between the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt and the CIO-socialist-communist collaborations – the so-called “New Deal” coalition – terrified the employer class. The coalition’s key 1930s achievements included establishing the Social Security system, federal unemployment insurance, the nation’s first minimum wage, and a federal public jobs program that hired many millions of the then unemployed. What terrified the employer class even more was how the New Deal coalition paid for those achievements. It reformed the federal tax system in a sharply progressive direction. Because corporations and the rich were especially taxed, US wealth and income inequalities dropped sharply. Then in the 1940s, the same US government that took huge steps against economic inequality at home allied itself with the Communist Party leadership of the USSR (Stalin) to fight World War 2 against fascism.

By 1945, with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the US employer class had become, like its European counterpart, obsessed with the great twin dangers of “communism at home and abroad.” Parallel obsessions in western Europe and the US converged in a joint plan. Employers and their political supporters and dependents attacked Communist parties everywhere, depicting them as mere agents or dupes of a foreign power, namely the USSR. They demonized the USSR as the epitome of evil, a dark empire threatening democracy, freedom, Judeo-Christian values, religion per se, civil liberties, and so on. A Cold War was declared between the former allies, NATO emerged, and the Warsaw Pact followed as did arms races and geo-political confrontations. The US would lead NATO to “contain the Soviet threat.” The US organized alliances across other continents while locating hundreds of military bases across them. Beyond means of “containment,” the bases marked and enforced a new informal US global empire that replaced much of the old British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Japanese, and other expiring colonialisms.

“Anti-communism” ideologically unified the domestic and international strategies of the employer classes in Europe and the United States. Under that ideological banner, those employer classes mobilized their governments to collaborate with them to destroy national communist parties and the USSR. As global hegemon, the US went further. It demonized socialism and socialist parties by defining and treating them as nearly identical with their communist counterparts. It also used anti-communism as a major ideological weapon to replace formal European and Japanese colonialisms by the informal, US-dominated “rules based international order.”

The US-western Europe connection helped employer classes in both regions to repress or at least weaken their nations’ communist and socialist parties. The US moved very aggressively (as in the Taft-Hartley law of 1947) also to destroy labor unions at home and collaborated with anti-union forces across Europe. Where war-weakened Europe lost its colonies, a strong post-war US could and did rush in to integrate the ex-European colonies into a US empire. The new US empire had to be informal. It had to allow the ex-colonies formal political independence even as it subordinated them to US economic, military, and political dominance across most of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Europe sank into the role of the US’s very junior partner.

The US-western Europe connection brought the US valuable allies against the USSR. Given the military technology of the two world wars - reliance on huge armies fighting across immense terrains - Europe was a land buffer usefully located between the US and the USSR. It provided added protection to the Atlantic ocean’s water buffer. European colonialism had created a genuine world economy that the US could take over. Within that world economy’s particular hierarchy, Europeans were dominant nearly everywhere (except, of course, in the case of Japanese colonialism). Non-Europeans were integrated as subordinated people (economically, politically, culturally). As the Europeans’ formal empires gave way to the US informal empire, colonialist hierarchies persisted with the only real changes occurring at the top. There the civilian and military chiefs of the US (and their delegates) chose, elevated and enriched local elites to direct its informal empire’s development.

The Marshall Plan funded postwar Europe’s recovery in ways that also secured its subordinate role in the new US empire. Funds distributed by the US Central Intelligence Agency since 1947, by the US Endowment for Democracy since 1983, and by other public and private groups supplemented the Marshall money. The advisers who often came with the funds gave Europe’s anti-communist political parties, mass media, labor unions, academic and cultural organizations, many means to use against their domestic enemies. The post-1945 US-western Europe alliance mounted an immense, richly-funded, never ending campaign to shape and control world history. It worked well, overcoming numerous challenges, for 70 years until internal and external forces combined to end it. Now, as the US-western Europe connection dissolves, the contours of its totality and historical significance become clearer.

The relentless rise of China’s economy outgrew the economies of all parts of the US-western Europe alliance over recent decades. China thereby contributed crucially to that alliance’s dissolution. So too has China’s ability simultaneously to forge a new global economic coalition, the BRICS (initially Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The BRICS’ establishment and growth (with new members and partners) responded to their felt needs for mutual support and less economic dependence on the US. The BRICS passed a milestone in 2020 (downplayed in Europe and the US) when their aggregate GDP surpassed that of the G7. The former has continued without interruption to outgrow the latter through the present.

The anti-colonialism that inspired the transitions from colonies to independent nations over the last century has survived that transition. It sometimes infuses rebellions against the hegemony of the US. At other times and places it coalesces with religious movements and populist social movements. In these and other ways, it too helps shape changing patterns of global trade and investment. Ex-colonies seek and engage alternatives to trade and investment with former colonial masters in London, Paris, Berlin, etc. They form new economic partnerships with China and increasingly with other BRICS. Increasing competition and lost economic opportunities challenge western Europe, Japan and the US. They also reduce the role of the US dollar as world currency.

The Trump regime represents both the extent of that decline and extreme efforts to stop or at least slow it. Hitting nearly the whole world with tariffs, suddenly and massively without warnings or negotiations, is a desperate act. Offering subsequently to lower initially high tariff rates in exchange for tribute (foreign nations’ commitments to spend and invest $ hundreds of billions in the US) is a blunt, stark, and hostile act. That European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accepted it is a craven act of Europe’s even more desperate submission. The war on Iran with Israel without consultation or preparation with its European and other allies, coupled with demands for massive, risky support for the US war effort, was also a desperate act. Its goal was to reverse the decline of the US empire; its result was the opposite. The decline accelerated.

The decline, still not admissible publicly in most US politicians’ discourses, nonetheless lurks everywhere in widespread feelings of lost national direction and/or impending social doom. Trump bitterly reproaches former allies like Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and, above all, western Europe. For example, he rewrites post-1945 history as a story of western Europeans, among others, cheating and abusing the US economy because weak US governments failed to resist and fight back. Trump presents his tariffs as the overdue fight back heroically ending the previous weak governments. Trump was so invested in such political theater situating him as “the strong leader,” that his sudden, rushed tariff program was intolerable even to a Supreme Court he otherwise controls.

Abducting Maduro from Venezuela, the 12-day war on Iran with Israel in June, 2025, and their longer one begun in March, 2026: these are also pieces of the same political theater. They are made-for-the-media distractions: not just from the hovering Epstein scandals or the deeply-troubled inequalities of the domestic US economy, but from the deeper threats of a declining empire. Thus a reaction formation type of neo-colonialism inspires many of Trump’s favorite distractions. So far from admitting decline, those distractions construct a US empire as strong and growing, taking over nations like Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran while planning the same for Panama, Canada, Greenland, Mexico and others. When charged with violating international law and the whole United Nations project, Trump proudly rebrands both actions as bold signs of US strength.

Now again, as in 1945, western Europe and the US find themselves at crossroads. The declining empires then were the Europeans’. Now in 2026 it is the decline of the US empire that has become both the US’s and Europe’s problem. In its desperate moves to slow or stop that decline, the US has turned on its subordinated European partners. That problem and that turning derive from the empire decline shaping this historical moment.

In Trump’s second presidency, he withdrew much of the US’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. This not only weakened the Ukrainian side in that war but also left a militarily underdeveloped Europe to rely even more on economic sanctions against Russia. Europe thus lost access to cheap Russian oil and gas. High energy prices resulted, drove up European export prices, and thus damaged its competitiveness. Meanwhile, China’s relentless growth miracle (fast-rising productivity and low inflation) continued its many years of outperforming both Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder and European competitiveness generally. China’s GDP growth far exceeded that of the entire West for the last few decades. Volkswagen’s crisis was so severe it seriously considered the US invitation to move its immense company to the US from Germany. Deindustrialization now deeply disturbs all of Europe’s economies.

The global economy looks increasingly like a great contest between China and the US with Europe increasingly out of the picture or merely a footnote to it. Trump’s massive tariffs on or demands for tribute from Europe combine both abandonments and assaults by the US on its former allies. NATO trembles and faces growing forces of dissolution. Trump demands European nations fund their own defenses in part because the declining US empire needs to enlarge its own military as an offset, Trump hopes, to that decline.

The Europeans are stuck in that metaphorical room whose walls are closing in on them. Their subordination is reflected in their passage from junior partners in US led Coalitions of the Willing to the 2026 Iran war that Spain and Italy have refused to join. Trump openly threatens to leave NATO. The employer classes of Europe are most worried about the combination of no more US-funded defense protection via NATO and the compensatory need to fund expanded European military spending. That will likely mean reducing European spending on its social welfare model of capitalism. Employer classes who do that risk triggering massive opposition from the left (labor unions, socialist, communist and anti-capitalist parties increasingly working together).

So far, Europe’s employer classes have tried to cope with this situation by a quasi-hysterical campaign to demonize Russia as a threat to invade and conquer its European neighbors. Europe’s current, mostly low-in-the-polls heads of state position themselves as great bulwarks against the Russian danger. This strategy aims to justify the increased spending on defense that in turn necessitates reduced government welfare spending. The latter is then rationalized as the whole society’s necessary sacrifice for safety from the Russian demon. The employer classes hope that this way of retaining their wealth, income and power will not be opposed by their working classes as the political issue of our times. The employer classes prefer that the great hyped Russian danger be the political issue.

While the Russian danger discourse might secure Europe’s employer classes a few more years of sitting atop Europe’s wealth and power distributions, it fails to address Europe’s long-term decline. That promises to continue and quite possibly accelerate because little is being done in Europe to directly oppose that continuance. Indeed, the disagreements inside Europe on whether to join the US/Israeli war on Iran coupled with fear of being singled out for retaliations by Trump heightened the competitive pandering among Europeans to curry favor with him. Such divisions have always weakened European unity. Rebuilding that unity is surely a necessary, albeit insufficient, component of any imaginable rescue of Europe from its deepening decline.

The long, uneven, and sometimes frustratingly slow historical shift from capitalist colonialism to today’s anti-imperialism undermined first Europe’s and now the US’s empires. A new crossroads beckons. One way leads toward a new Chinese global empire. Another leads toward a multi-national program of mutual accommodation, a kind of socialism with global characteristics.

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Professor Wolff’s latest book “Understanding Capitalism” is available now for purchase: Here

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Americans are increasingly struggling to make ends meet, while the rich get even richer. Professor Richard Wolff and producer Nicole Roussell debunk corporate media justifications for this inequality.

Professor Richard Wolff is an author & co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work. You can find his work at rdwolff.com.

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Professor Richard Wolff guest hosting The Deep Focus Show. The Deep Focus Show airs weekly on WBAI and is also available on YouTube providing Raw, intelligent conversations with investigative journalists, whistleblowers, political analysts, and influential voices from around the world.

in this episode of Deep Focus, Richard Wolff sits down with former U.S. Marine captain and foreign policy analyst Matthew Hoh to discuss the escalating conflict with Iran, the shifting balance of global power, and what they describe as the decline of the American empire.

Drawing from his military and State Department experience, Hoh explains why sections of the Pentagon and intelligence community may be resisting further escalation, how U.S. intelligence failures mirror past wars, and why Washington’s political class struggles to adapt to a changing multipolar world.

The conversation also explores generational divides in American politics, the growing risk of confrontation with China, and the deeper geopolitical forces shaping the 21st century.

The Deep Focus Show dives into global politics, international conflicts, corruption, media narratives, and the most important issues of our time — bringing perspectives rarely seen in mainstream media.

No scripted talking points. No manufactured outrage. Just real conversations and serious journalism.

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